How to Triple Your Plumbing & HVAC Sales with the Right Digital Marketing Strategy

welcome everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. On today’s workshop, we’re gonna be talking all about how to triple your sales by getting your internet marketing right. And I know for some of us that feels like a big claim. I’m gonna back that up by case studies and examples of plumbing, HVAC, electrical companies we’ve worked with.

And there, there is a way, right there, there is a path to get more leads, more sales, more revenue growth, especially in this trade, right? The beautiful thing about home services, especially plumbing HVAC and electrical, is that there’s a lot of demand and there’s a shortage of tradespeople, right?

And so if you’ve got your marketing strategy dialed in and you’ve got a great approach to get customers, get those customers, convert them into repeat buyers that refer you to others, and you become the known home service contractor in your market, there’s no reason you can’t have massive accelerated growth.

And I did put together a workbook for this. If you guys want to access it, you can go to plumber seo.net/workbook. Let me see if I’ve got the wrong presentation up. It should be, plumber seo.net/workbook. Nick, if you can drop that into the chat for me you guys can use that to track along today.

I’ve got lots of like thought examples. I’ve got questions you can ask yourself and rate yourself throughout this process because what I do wanna make sure is that today’s session’s practical, right? I’m gonna talk about some new things going on in the digital marketing space.

I’m gonna talk about, what we’re seeing working in today’s market. But most important to me is that you walk away saying, okay, here’s two or three things I can go and implement right now to generate better results, to generate better outcomes. Just give me a yes in the chat if that’s helpful, right?

If we can just try and make this as practical as possible, I think that workbook will help you. Track along with me, help you find the gaps and and get the outcomes that you’re after. Alright, Mike says, yes. Thank you. Appreciate that. Here’s what we’re gonna cover a couple things. I will walk you through the accelerated growth model that we’ve been using to keep yourself in a ated growth in your plumbing, HVAC or electrical business.

We’ll talk about the most important online marketing channels you should be paying attention to. Let’s face it, things are changing, right? The way this marketing stuff works has changed significantly over the last year, over the last couple of years. Just type change if you can feel some changes coming, whether it’s because of ai, whether it’s because of marketing automation, whether it’s because of some other mix of changes in the market.

So I’ll talk about those specific changes you want to be aware of long term, but also what’s working right now in the immediate moment to make sure you’re showing up where your customers are looking and that you’re generating those leads and those sales. And we’ll talk about how to come up better organically.

We’ll talk about which pay channels you want to be tapping into, and how to generate two to three times more job from the traffic that you’re already generating. For those of you that don’t know, my name is Josh Nelson. I’m the founder of Plumbing and Hvac, SEO. I’m the author of the book, how to Triple Your Sales by Getting Your Internet Marketing Right.

We now work with about 176 of the top plumbing HVAC home service companies from across the country active in a lot of the trade groups like CEO, warrior Nexstar, service Roundtable, QSC. And we’ve been doing this for quite some time, but I’d say more important than any of that stuff is this is what we do, right?

We’ve worked with plumbing, HVAC, home service companies just like you and some of the most competitive markets. And been able to see them go from obscurity online to now where they’re the dominant player. I was checking with the team recently and saying, a lot of our clients have gotten acquired, and that’s not necessarily a great thing for us, but it’s a great thing for our clients.

You know what, like what’s the number there? I think at our latest count, at least 13 of our clients have grown to, multimillion dollar plumbing, HVAC home service companies and have been acquired either by private equity or somebody else. And so I can tell you that when you get your digital marketing dialed in, not only can you make more money, not only can you have scale growth, but you also become very attractive for acquisition.

Let me know in the chat here, just type acquisition, if that’s something you aspire to, maybe not right now, but maybe at some point down the track, make yourself attractive enough. Have your operation dialed in enough that you can get that nice liquidity event and really put some good money into the bank.

But anyways, this is what we do day in and day out. And so what I’m sharing isn’t based on theory, it’s not based on a blog post I read somewhere. It’s based on real world in the trenches experience with home service companies just like yours. And this is what we do, right? Our mission as an organization is to help 1000 plumbing HVAC home service companies triple their sales by getting their internet marketing right.

We’ve got a full team of. I guess like 47 full-time employees. This is what we do all day. Build websites, build organic strategies, run paid search campaigns, track the results and really optimize for continuous growth. And so if you’d some help with this and you’re like, Hey, you know what Josh?

I’d just like to have your company look at what we’re doing or put together a strategy on how we can work together. We’d love that opportunity. You can schedule that by going to plumbersseo.net/schedule. I’ll just have Nick drop that into the chat. And if, for some of us it’s I’d to know the information, but I really want, I want you guys to help us implement this.

We’d love the opportunity to have that conversation. So before we get into the how to, before we get into the training, I always like to start with why. ’cause, why is this even worth thinking about? Why is this even worth applying some attention to right now? Your marketing will make or break your business.

Bottom line, right? If we don’t have a way to keep the phone ringing, to keep the, draw the trucks running to keep the technicians busy, we could be great technicians, we could be great at the plumbing stuff. We can really understand indoor air quality. We can have all of the answers, but our business drives on demand, right?

And so marketing will make or break the business. And for most of you, you make a large investment in marketing. Historically in plumbing, HVAC, electrical and Home Services, you’re spending a lot of money on Facebook ads, on Google ads, on billboard advertising, on SEO and all of these different tactics.

But unfortunately, a lot of times there’s not a great return on that investment, right? And so we wanna make sure we know what are the right strategies and how do we get the best ROI from the investments that we’re making? But I also think a big reason why thinking about digital marketing, how to grow your online presence.

Is the opportunity cost of park trucks, right? We know that in this market, there’s a surplus of demand, right? There’s always homes that have issues that need to be solved. The challenge as you grow and scale your plumbing, HVAC electrical business that we’ve seen a lot of times is finding good technicians, trending up those technicians, getting them to the place where, they’re capable and they’re stick sticking around with the organization.

And the bigger reason to get your internet marketing dialed in is because if you don’t have enough demand at any given period of time for those technicians, you’ll lose them, right? And they’ll go somewhere else. And that’s probably a bigger cost than anything else we could talk about today. And if we don’t get this dialed in, ultimately you’re gonna spend a lot of money on marketing.

You’re gonna lose high quality technicians and you won’t have the type of growth that you want. And so the opportunity, really what we wanna walk through today, is how to nail your marketing. How to have a great return on investment where you’re like, okay, yes, I’m spending that thousand or that 5,000 or that $10,000 a month, but I know that’s coming back to me with the return on investment, right?

Really know that the money is going out, it’s being, invested wisely and that it’s coming back to us with growth and generating enough leads, enough book jobs, enough revenue to keep your trucks running and to know, okay, I’m ready to hire that next technician, or, I’m ready to put that next truck out in the field.

I’ve got a scalable plan, right? And really the success looks like you’ve gotta consistently growing business, you’ve got a path to bring technicians and continue to grow. And for some of us maybe, set the business up for an acquisition at some point down the track. And so again I do have a workbook for you guys.

I, I’d love for you guys all to pull this up real quick. For those of you that logged in a little bit later you go to plumber seo.net/workbook. I’ll be talking about a lot of concepts. I’ll be walking you through some exercises. That workbook will help you get clarity on what we’re actually doing.

And so I wanna start by telling a story. ’cause I really think that, I love talking about digital marketing and the technical side of it, but I personally learned better in terms of stories. And so I wanna tell you the story of Mark Norman from Shamrock Plumbing. And this is the client that we had the opportunity to work with over the course of over, over a decade now.

And when I first started working with Mark, he had grown his plumbing business in Orlando, Florida to, about a million dollars per year. But he had done it mostly through Yellow Pages, right? He had a big ad in the Yellow Pages, ’cause that’s where customers looked back in the day when they need these services.

And he hit a brick wall. Like the company, just stopped growing. He stopped getting enough lead flow to continue to grow the business. And what he realized at that time back in the day, was that there had been a shift in the market, right? There was a shift where people weren’t going to the Yellow Pages anymore.

When they needed plumbing services, they were going online, right? They started going online to, to Google to Yelp, to Angie, to Bing. And at that moment in time, he had to decide if that’s where people are, I need to make sure I’m showing up in that place versus where they happen to be looking in the past.

And I want you guys to be aware that just the Yellow Pages die at some point, right? It was like, okay, that used to work and now it doesn’t anymore. There’s a massive disruption happening online and in your marketing and if you are just doing Google advertising. You’re setting yourself up for potential disruption.

Again there’s a lot of trends happening right now in the marketplace where there’s an increase in popularity with ai. Just type AI in the chat. If you’re using chat Chief BT, perplexity, Claude, any of these platforms either for your business or for, for solving problems for yourself.

Travis is using ai. We use AI almost every day in our business in a lot of different ways. But I think there’s a trend here where more people are going to chat. GPT, they’re going to being, because it already has the search results baked in. Now Google’s still the a hundred pound gorilla. It’s still where people are looking, nine times outta 10 in today’s market.

But there is a little bit of a trend happening. We want to be aware of that. We want to be thinking about how do we make sure we’re positioning our company to come up in those types of results. The other big trend is online scheduling. With. Today’s cons, consumer on your plumbing and HVAC related services.

I know in the past we just wanted to optimize for a phone call, right? Hey look, let’s get them to phone in. And that’s what we want. Today’s customer is now more and more used to using their app, being able to, just to schedule something in and have it done. And so if in today’s market you’re not offering the opportunity for them to schedule directly online, you’re gonna be leaving customers, right?

They’re literally gonna get to your site and say, okay, all I can do here is submit this little form or call the number back, and they go to the next guy that has online scheduling. So we wanna make sure we’re making it easy for people to schedule in on your website. Also. Today’s customer would rather text with you than talk to you.

Now, am I saying stop answering your phones live? No, but I am saying there’s a segment of your customer base that if given the option to book online or to ask a couple of questions via text message, they’re gonna be much more likely to do business with you if you have that as a conversion factor in your overall strategy.

And there are companies today that are leveraging automation in their follow up and their follow through. They’re using automation to be faster to follow up with their leads. They’re using automation to follow up after the job is booked in order to get that customer to post a review. They’re using automation to follow up with that customer to get back into the home automatically at a time that makes sense to refer them to others.

And in today’s market, if you’re not paying attention to these trends and you’re not like paying attention to where things are right now and where they’re headed. You’re gonna be wasting money, like Mark did back in the day when he was still spending five or $10,000 a month in a double truck ad, which worked at one point, but then stopped working somewhere along the way.

And I’ll talk more about these trends as we go, but I think it’s important that we recognize things have shifted and we gotta meet the market where it’s at. And ideally, we want to be ahead of where our competition is so that we can stand outta the marketplace so that we can get a lower cost per customer and so that we can have better profitability in our organization.

And at the time, Mark’s big question was, how do I own the internet in my area? And he tried a couple different things. First of all, I’m just going way back in time here, but at the time he had done well on Yellow Pages. And at the time Yellow Pages had yp.com, which was like their online directory.

And so YP came in and said, Hey, we’re, we’ll get you up online, don’t worry. You’re gonna, you’re gonna do great. And so he hired yp.com and spent the money, didn’t get anything out of it. It was like a, literally a total waste of time. Then he was like, okay, that didn’t work very well. Let me go back to the drawing board.

And he was like sold on pay-per-click advertising, which at the time, if you think about the big players in this space, there was like, reach local and yodel. Let type either of those two companies if you tried them back in the time, and not that they’re bad or terrible, but the reality was they.

Set up a very basic website, and they were just doing Google ad advertising at the time, and he was like, Hey, we’re gonna get you up in the paid search results and that’s gonna make your phone ring. And he did get leads from it, and he did get some growth, in, I’m gonna say growth, he got leads in sales from it, but it was only commiserate to the expense.

So if he would spend five or $6,000 in Google ads, he would get five or $6,000 in booked revenue. And it was almost a wash. Like it absolutely didn’t generate the results that he needed or that he wanted as he was looking to grow the company. And I really wanna make sure you’re thinking in today’s market I think the similar correlation is, if you’re with a good paid search company that really does good Google ads, let’s just say, and they’re telling you, look, that’s the only play you need to focus on, that’s the only thing you need to do.

It would be almost like just doing. YP right? And just being like, okay, that, that was the next logical approach. Today’s market, you have to be thinking about answer engine optimization. You have to be thinking about marketing automation. You have to be thinking about following up and meeting your customers where they’re at.

And that was his question at the time. It’s okay, if they’re gone to the internet, how and how do I make sure I’m showing up where they’re looking? And so you gotta make sure that he was coming up organically, he was coming up in the paid search results and he had a website that would convert visitors into jobs, visitors into book calls.

And, in today’s market we’ve got was we’ve got local service ads that’s coming up at the very top still. We’ve got the map listings, which is still extremely prominent. And then we’ve got the organic results. And the organic results is a combination of competitor websites. It’s a combination of.

Directory websites like Angie and Thumbtack and Nextdoor. And really what we wanna do is make sure we’re coming up on Google. But in addition to that, we’re also coming up on the generative engines that your customers are starting to use. Especially chat GPT right now, that would be the most prominent generative engine.

But I think Perplexity and some of these other platforms, we want to be paying attention. ’cause right now, even in today’s market, nine outta 10 of your customers are still using Google. But there’s that growth factor that’s happening on those generative engines. And so in, in the case of Mark Norman, like we were focused, let’s make sure we’ve got a great website that’s built to convert.

Let’s make sure he’s coming up dominantly in all the places where his customers are looking. And we got his website set up so it converted really well. And then we made sure he was coming up organically. He was coming up in the paid search. He was coming up in all of those places. We implemented what I’ll be walking you through today, which is our digital dominance method, right?

All of the key things we need to be plugging into if we really want to maximize our lead flow online. And just over the years, right? 230 leads a month via the internet. 497 of leads per month via the internet. 586 leads per month via the internet. 818 leads a month via the internet. And his revenue more than gr tripled year over year as we got his internet marketing dialed in.

And he was able to grow from like $250,000 per year to 5.5 million. Grew from one truck to seven trucks and recently sold this is one of our case studies as a client we worked with for a very long time, and he was acquired by another company, had a nice exit. You can see here, white Wolf capital acquires Shamrock.

How many of you know somebody that was recently acquired, just type acquired, if maybe one of your friends, one of your competitors. This is a big thing happening in the industry. And I, maybe that’s not the goal right now, but let’s set up our company so that it’s profitable enough so that it has enough deal flow so that it is attractive for acquisition.

So let’s get tactical now. Let’s apply this to your business. And again, this is where your workbooks are gonna come into play plumber seo.net/workbook. You can grab this and track along with me. And so the model that we think about in today’s market in order to triple your sales, and ideally, you could triple your sales somewhere over the next 12 to 24 months by fully implementing this strategy.

And obviously you have to constantly be innovating. You’ve gotta constantly be moving to where things are headed, but we call this our accelerated growth model. And in order to have consistent accelerated growth in your home service business, number one is we’ve gotta drive leads, right? We’ve gotta drive those interested homeowners that have a problem that your company can solve.

Number two is we’ve gotta maximize conversion. And this is where most marketing, digital marketing, especially agencies don’t focus, right? They, most digital marketing agencies will just tell you, Hey, we’re gonna generate the leads. That’s all we need to think about. But equally important to generating leads is we have to convert the traffic into an inquiry, and then we gotta in, we gotta convert the inquiry into a book job.

And ideally, we then have to convert the onetime customer into a repeat customer that uses you again and refers you to others, right? So we have to maximize conversion from there. We’ve gotta optimize results, which is we gotta figure out, okay, if we’re gonna have a goal, right? And we’re gonna set some targets and we’re gonna spend some money, we really have to be able to track down and see, alright, how much are we spending on SEO, organic strategies, paid search, local service ads, Facebook ads, retargeting, how much are we spending?

What’s actually generating the results? And let’s make sure we’re spending the money in the areas that are gonna generate the best results. We have to make sure that we optimize for the results. And so when it comes to driving leads, regardless of how you split this up first, you’ve got organic, right?

And we want to make sure we’re optimizing the organic play, which is. Jet, GPT, Google free, paid free listings online. The leads, we don’t have to pay per click. The leads, we don’t have to pay per lead for. And so right now there’s a lot of verbiage that comes in when we say SEO, right? SEO is you get like search engine optimization getting you ranked in the search engines.

And right now, in today’s market, that’s still, let’s get you to come up on Google and there’s a very small search volume happening on Bing. And there, there’s an opportunity to play there, but there’s two new optimization strategies that are very commonly, being referenced. And that’s a EO and GEO.

So a EO is answer engine optimization. Answer engines are Alexa, they’re. Siri, right? People are using those answer engines to get answers to questions. And then there’s GEO generative engine optimization, which is chat, GPT, Gemini, perplexity, copilot, and all of those other law, large language models. And when I say organic, I, we want to make sure we’ve got great content, that we’ve got great information, we’ve got proper citations, we’ve got proper schema so that we can come up, whether it’s on Google or chat, GGBT or whatever platform your customers are looking on.

And so we’ve been testing this very closely and a lot of the key strategies that we implement for our clients from a from an SA pure Google SEO strategy work really well, right? And they apply well to the, to, like to the generative engines. But there’s also some nuance to it. There’s some specific things we’ve discovered as it relates to schema, as it relates to user generated content sites that we’ve found can actually help to get our clients coming up well in generative search.

And just as an example here, if we go to chat, GPT, we were to search, best plumbing companies in Fargo, North Dakota. One of the companies we work with in that market is ladies, right? And you can see right now in a lot of chat PT searches, it’s actually coming up with a map and it’s showing three companies and it will show you, like here’s the companies here’s why we rated these companies in the results.

And so when I say organic, we want to make sure we’re not just thinking about Google, we’re thinking of those other engines as well. But fundamentally. We want to make sure that we’re giving the websites, we’re giving the search engines and the generative engines, the key information about your company, right?

Which means we need pages for each of our services, right? If we do plumbing, we need the page for the dr, for the drain cleaning and the water heaters and the emergency and the trench list. If we’re HVAC, we need the pages for indoor air quality and AC repair and AC installation, and probably reference the key brands that we serve so that we can come up for those obvious terms that people are typing.

Then we have to optimize it correctly, which is putting our keywords in the title tags, the H one tags, the meta descriptions, the copy on the website, the schema markup on the page itself. And we need to make sure the content is unique, right? And yes, we can use AI for some of this, but we can’t lean too heavily on AI because there’s just a bunch of garbage content being loaded up on the internet.

And so we wanna make sure we’ve got unique, accurate information tied back to authorship. And so I, I’m not gonna get super technical, but to, to the extent we can tie back your content to the owner of the company as the author and owner of that particular organization that passes more authority to the website, that’s going to improve rankings and to improve how well we come up and get recommended in generative search results.

What I think organic still, the a hundred pound gorilla is your Google Map listing. And so making sure we’ve got properly claimed, properly optimized Google Map results and that we’ve got continuous posts happening there. We’ve got great imagery, we’ve got special offers being loaded up. We’re loading up q and as we’re answering those q and as we’re getting reviews, we’re responding to those reviews.

All that plays up into getting ranked well on the map. We’ve gotta be putting out new content on a consistent basis. That ideally answers the questions your customers are asking. There’s a great book called They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. I’m not sure if you guys have read that, but that’s the basic premise of the content we want to be loading up.

Yes, we want the key content about what our organization does, right? But we’ve got a couple that with the common questions that are coming up. ’cause when you combine your services, your market, the actual city and the cities that you serve with answers to questions that people in your market are asking, that’s how you build your authority come up really well.

Now outside of that, we’ve gotta build authority and trust and we do that by citations. We do that by links. We do that by reviews, by building your authority up over time. Good example of this in the real world, one of the companies we work with is the Meridian Company. They’re based in East Lansing, Michigan.

They’ve grown significantly over the last couple years. But if we go in and we search east Lansing plumber, you can see their organic listing comes up and then they come up on maps and organically, they also come up really well in generative search. But the reason I wanna show you is I want you to see I want you to see the actual tracking, right?

So we invest about $8,000 a month in advertising. That’s our management fees plus whatever paid search we’re doing. We track very closely see how many leads, how many, opportunities are coming in from that. So we can see 419 leads generated and an average of $19 and 32 cents per lead. And then we can see 95 came from organic, 127 from pay per click, 173 directly from Google Map.

So that’s the organic piece of the equation right there. It’s a lot of the actual calls and the lead flow coming directly from organic results. And 65% from organic and, we’re still getting attribution down where we can say how much of that came from the chat, GPT very hard to quantify that in today’s market.

But if all we were doing was paid search, if we were just doing Google local service ads, or we were just doing Google Ads specifically, we’re just doing other things, we’d be missing out on a lot of the search volume, a lot of the traffic. And that’s why I say first we wanna make sure we’re tapping into the organic results as much as we possibly can.

And so that, that’s organic. And in your workbooks, I’ve got a bunch of ideas. So if you’re looking at that, you’re like, Hey, you know what? I need to drill down on more my organic strategy. I need to figure out what we’re missing. I’ve got a lot of technical details there. I’m happy to answer any questions that you guys have, but I have it for you in the workbook, so that’s organic.

After that, we also wanna make sure that we’re tapping out paid advertising because we’re only gonna go so far organically. We can have a great website that comes up organically. We can have our company organization optimized, but in order to really have a knob that we can turn, if the goal is to triple the sales every 12 to 24 months, we’re gonna need to put some gasoline behind that.

And so that’s where paint advertising comes into play. And when I think about paid advertising in the context of your plumbing, HVAC electrical company organic is the foundation like to make sure we’ve got a good website, we’ve got a good footprint, we’ve got great authorship, and we’re getting the high quality, low cost opportunities.

Up from there, we would probably want to tap into paid advertising and local service ads. So when I say paid advertising specifically, I’m talking about paid search. ’cause directionally, when somebody goes to Google and they type in, plumber near me, or best plumbers in, or Orlando or Drain cleaning service in my area, they’ve got a problem that they need solved, right?

And we want to make sure that we’re the ones coming up when that problem is happening. And with paid search and local service ads, predominantly local service ads right now we can show up in those results and we can pay on a per lead or per click basis. And I would say right now, you, you wanna do a little bit of both, but I would open up the budget as wide as you can afford on local service ads, right?

It’s still, that’s still some of the highest quality lead flow you can get and it generates a good return on investment. And I got a little dotted line at that point because I would say, once you’ve got that in place, before we spend on a lot of other advertising strategies, let’s do a couple things.

Let’s put retargeting in place, which means we pixel the visitor that gets to your website or engages with your landing pages and we can now retarget them so they see us again and again. So if they’re in an immediate buying frame, they’re gonna see us over the next two weeks in their social feed.

They’re gonna see us on banner ads. Ideally, we have a second bat to try and get them while they’re still in the buying frame. But I also think we should all be thinking brand, right? We all need to be thinking, how do we become the go-to plumbing HVAC electrical company in this city? And the way we do that is by developing a known brand so that they don’t even have to go to Google when they need a plumber.

Next time they need a plumber, they’re going straight to your company ’cause they’ve already done business with you and they remember you. And so having a very aggressive retargeting strategy where anybody that’s ever done business with you, anybody that’s ever gotten into your world is gonna see you again and again.

And we do that through retargeting. I think in addition, like as you start to move up this hierarchy, you have to have some level of automation in place. If you’re not automatically capturing the names and phone numbers and emails of people that get to your website, if you’re not automatically following up with them after they call and or after they submit a form on your website or request a schedule, you’re gonna get left behind.

So I’ll talk about this more in a minute, but speed the lead is the key. And if we’re not leveraging automation, there’s no way we can beat as fast as our competitor that is leveraging automation. Okay. And then, so going up from there, you’ve got paid directories and pay per lead services, which I know we’ve all used Angie and we’ve all used Nextdoor and we’ve all used some of these other lead aggregators, and we hate them, right?

Because the quality of the lead isn’t great. But, there is a place for that, especially if you’ve got good automation in place and you wanna make sure you’re capturing as much market share for people that are in the market at that moment in time. Investing in those paper lead services makes sense.

And at the very top of the hierarchy, we’ve got social advertising. I think you can build to $10 million, just in organic and paid search. Maybe tap into these directories if you want to go, 10 million plus. And I know some of you on the call today are at that level. Building up your brand through social advertising makes a lot of sense.

So YouTube ads, Facebook ads, TikTok ads, that’s it’s brand advertising. It’s putting an offer in front of people that may or may not need your services right now. But you’ve got enough money that you can afford to hit that market aggressively. And the beauty is, we can do this in a way we couldn’t before.

Right? And way back in the past, we had Yellow Pages, radio ads and TV ads, right? And it was like you had to spend a ton of money to really play that game. We can do that in a very small market through brand advertising. We could say, Hey, we just want to target the homeowners in this two mile radius that have homes that are worth over, half a million dollars and saturate that market in a way we never could in the past.

And so there is a play for it. I wouldn’t make that your predominant play unless you’re at a little bit higher level in the organization. And a lot of paid search campaigns, a lot of local service ads campaigns fail just because they’re not structured correctly. Just because, there’s a lack of understanding of the oxygen process, quality score factors, all the things that go into actually generating results online.

But I wanna tell you that, that. When done correctly paid advertising in plumbing, HVAC, home services can and should be very profitable. And so I’ll just share an example here. Cardinal Home Services is one of the companies we work with. We’re looking just at their paid search. We’re looking just at Google Ads in this scenario.

$9,000 investment in Google ads. We’re tracking. Of course. Don’t do this if you’re not tracking. 222 leads tracked. So if we divide that out, that’s $40 per lead, not too bad, even in a competitive market. Now, if we do the math here, 224 leads with a 40% conversion rate. That’s 90 book jobs, average ticket of seven 50, that’s $67,000 in revenue on that investment.

That’s a seven and a half times return on investment. And I can show lots of examples of clients we work with. When we optimize it and we set it up correctly, we’re able to get those types of returns, right? And that’s what we want with our paid search. We want our paid search campaign set up where it doesn’t feel like we’re going to a slot machine and we’re putting money out there and it’s Hey, I hope I get something out of this.

And we hope and pray. We want it to be more like going to the at TM where you know you’re gonna put your card in and you’re gonna put a certain amount of money and a certain amount of money’s gonna come out on the other side. And when we do this correctly, and when we set up the landing pages we set up the A groups correctly, we set up the retargeting, we set up the automation, we could consistently get those types of outcomes.

So that’s paid search. Lots of different strategies we can lump in on the paid search. The last thing I’m gonna suggest that we should all be thinking about when it comes to driving leads is your database. And there’s lots of money in your database. These are your past customers. These are people that inquired about your services but didn’t convert.

And they’re probably sitting in your CRM Lemme know what platform you used today. Are you ServiceTitan? Are you house Call Pro? Are you field Edge? Are you something else? A lot of companies in this place, in this industry generate a lot of leads, right? We get leads, we can inquiries, but we only focus on the ready to convert buyer, the customers that are ready to do something right now.

And we never follow up with the unconverted opportunities. And we very rarely follow up with our past customer base. But there’s money in that database. And so database marketing is literally saying, we’re gonna follow up with those people. We’ve got emails, cell phone numbers, and contact details. And we’re gonna generate what is found money without having to invest more on paid advertising and organic search strategies.

And so just a visual example of this, right? Let’s say we’ve got cell phone numbers for past customers and unconverted opportunities. Every couple of months we can send a an a topical offer that’s non-obtrusive, that just shakes the bushes and finds a reason to get back into the home. And so in this example, Hey Alice.

Hey. This is Alice with Bob’s Plumbing with Fall Here. Wanna be sure your home is protected from the cold as your trusted HVAC professionals? We’re running a limited special $500 off a new HVAC install. Simple reply. Yes, and I’ll send you the details. And they can either click a button yes or they can contact reply yes.

Simple as that. We send that out to customers, they respond back. We use some automations to schedule in and we’ve got new deal flow from what was just dormant opportunities, dormant contacts in our database. And I’ll tell you, we do this for almost every one of the clients we work with. It’s one of the secret strategies that we found would be really effective to improve return on investment, to keep deal flow consistent.

And when there’s times where things are slow, we can do a database reactivation and generate some opportunities and keep the trucks moving. And so an example of this is 72 degrees. One of the companies we work with, we had a, they had a list of 5,000 prospects in their database. We had, we sent that simple message, that simple offer, just looking for a reply.

Yes, if you want some help, 300 replies, 119 book jobs, $84,000 in revenue. And we can do that on a pretty consistent basis, assuming you’ve got a database, which you probably do, you just don’t know where it sits today. And there’s an opportunity there. And so what I want you to do in your workbooks, this is just the drive leads portion of what we’re talking about today.

Where’s the opportunity? Like green, yellow, red, green being, yeah, I’m crushing it. I’ve got that figured out. It’s working really well in my company today. Yellow, I think you could be better red. You’re not doing it or you’re doing it very poorly. I’d love for you just to highlight those in your workbook and say, okay, the database thing, we’re not doing that.

That’s red. I should probably do something about that. My SEO organic stuff, I haven’t done anything with generative search yet. I haven’t even looked to see if I come up that’s probably yellow, I should probably go back and revisit that. And then maybe paid searches like, you know what, I have no idea where that money’s going.

That’s probably yellow or red. If you had to put in the chat for me, one that would be a gray area or a yellow area or red that you’re like, okay, that’s an opportunity for me to focus on. Let me know what it is for you right now in the chat and I’ll keep going for the sake of time. Alright.

After that. So we’ve taught a lot about how we can generate leads through organic. Through paid, and then through database marketing, the next thing we wanna focus on is how do we maximize the conversion of those visitors, of those leads, of those customers into book jobs, into revenue. And so there’s a couple things, right?

First and foremost when it comes to, when it comes to conversion, is your website, people are going to inevitably wind up on your website, whether it’s on the desktop or whether it’s on mobile, more mobile than ever. They’re gonna wind up there before they convert. And if your website isn’t built to convert, if you’re not making it easy for someone to give you their money you’re losing opportunities, right?

You’re creating friction that’s making the return on the investment from your advertising ineffective. And so in your workbooks, I’ve got a massive list of the key things. You wanna look at your website through the lens do I have this, do I have that? Have I optimized for this?

Here’s the opportunity. I’m just gonna show you visually, ’cause I think it’s a little bit easier to look at it in this way. And so let’s pull up an example of one of our clients here that’s got a website that’s really built to convert. And I’m gonna share the screen and let’s pull this up. So this is JD Precision.

They’re based in spring, Texas, and they’ve had significant growth. They made the Inc 500, 500 lists multiple years in a row. There’s a couple things that we always try to focus on when it comes to improving conversion on your site. First and foremost is personality and authenticity. If you can have real pictures of your team, real pictures of your technicians, real pictures of yourself as the owner.

That improves conversion. People wanna do business with real people that they know and trust. And don’t put just stock imagery. Get some real, invest in some high quality photographs of your team at work that’s gonna help with conversion. But outside of that, really the other key thing is, remember that people wanna convert ’em one of three ways way One is that they pick up the phone and they call, right?

And in the past that was the main way. It was like, Hey, we just want you to, we want you to call our office. But way number two, in today’s market, if they’ve got the opportunity they wanna schedule online, right? So having the opportunity for them to enter some details about their problem and schedule online is going to give you a massive competitive advantage.

Even if you don’t have it all synced back to your dispatch platform. And it’s just let them soft pick a time tomorrow or the next day at 3:00 PM. Once they’ve scheduled or tentatively scheduled online, their search is over. If you think about the buying frame of your customer, they’ve got a problem.

The plumber the plumbing is drained, right? It’s a big issue for them. And so they start to h right? They take out their phone, they do a Google search. First company they click on, all they could do is call. So they call and they went around, they try and talk to somebody and it goes to voicemail.

And so it’s okay, gotta go to the next one. They go to the next site and they’ve got this opportunity to submit a form. And so they’re like, okay, hopefully someone calls me back quick. They enter all their details in and they hit submit and all right, I’m gonna hit the back button, try the next company, try and call there.

They’re gonna keep looking until they’ve got it either scheduled or something’s finished. And so if on your website they can go in and they can actually pick tomorrow at three o’clock, a technician’s potentially gonna come out to the house, even if that’s not hard booked in their mind. They’ve done the next action and they’re done, right?

And so they stop searching and they’re gonna go on with their day. Today’s customer doesn’t want to have to call. They don’t want to have to sit around. They are used to booking online, whether it’s for their groceries, whether it’s for a car to pick them up. And so our clients that are putting online scheduling in place are winning in today’s market.

So make sure that you have some type of online scheduling on the website. And then also give them the opportunity to chat, because sometimes they don’t sometimes they can’t schedule ’cause they’ve got a question or they don’t know if you serve their area where they don’t know if you’ve got the answer, or if you can do the thing that they need.

And so if they’ve got the option to either phone or text, they’re gonna try and text, right? And so have those three conversion factors on your website. Phone call. Two-way text message. Or chat. And ideally with technology today, we can put some automation behind the chat. So there’s only, probably 30 different questions that your customers gonna ask before they schedule their call.

They might ask, do you serve my area? They might ask how much it’s gonna cost. They might ask, do you have somebody that can come out today? They’re gonna ask a series of questions and we can train ai. And you guys know AI is pretty, pretty intelligent. Now we can train ai. If they ask this, come up with a variation of the question on that and what, based on what they respond and say, would you like to schedule a time?

And if they respond back, sure, then look at the schedule and offer them availability or send them the link to online book themselves. Get that in place. If you don’t have the automation in set up behind it, that’s fine, but at least give those three conversion factors. A try. ’cause it will massively reduce your cost per lead.

It will massively increase the return on all of the other marketing that you do. And it will give you the ability to be competitive, even with larger companies in your market, because the company that could spend the most to acquire a customer always wins. And again, there’s lots of different factors in your workbook here.

I’ll pull this up. I don’t wanna, it’ll beat a dead horse. So you have these, this workbook, if you wanna really go deep on this and see, okay does it talk to my avatar? Do I have the online scheduling? Do I have all of these different factors? I’ve given that to you here in a checklist and I’ll tell you, just go back and check that out.

But the key things that we’re finding is the phone number in the top right hand corner. Ability to schedule directly online, the ability to start a two-way chat message, speaking to them in the, not in terms of technical, but in terms of, their problem and why you’re the unique solution.

To help them is what works best in terms of converting these leads into book jobs. And a good example is like when we’re talking about JD Precision here, $14,000 invested in online, a little bit larger company, a little bit more money to invest. We track really closely 134 from inbound calls, 145 from Google Ads, 339 from Google Maps.

It’s an average cost per lead of $22 and six 9 cents or 625 leads. That is manageable, right? That’s the number they can continue to invest. They can continue to grow. They can continue to hit the and expand the team. And again, they made the Inc 500 list, multiple years in a row in their marketplace.

Alright next up. When it comes to conversion. So if your website’s built to convert, that helps significantly. The other thing that will impact your conversion is your reputation, right? Because. A typical customer is going to get to your website. They’re gonna be like, okay, this seems like a good company.

Let me check out their reviews right before they call. In a lot of cases, they’re gonna go back and they’re gonna say, reviews for JD Precision, right? Or reviews for whatever the name of your company is. And if you don’t have reviews and or you’ve got a negative review, reputation, less than four stars, that’s gonna harm your conversion rates.

And so we wanna really optimize for that reputation piece. The best way to do this in today’s market is obviously create a great world-class experience, right? And bake it into the culture of your organization. Make sure that an email, text message goes out after every service call requesting a review that, has been in place for quite some time.

But the clients that we see get the best volume of reviews where almost, almost one in 15 service calls generates an online review. Is when we leverage automation. And so I asked earlier for you guys to drop in what platform you use. Most of our clients use ServiceTitan House Call, pro Field Edge yeah, field Edge, those types, Sarah.

But what we wanna do is leverage automation so that once the job is complete once you complete the job within the dispatch platform, we leverage automation where an email goes out, Hey, thanks for your service. Would love it if you write us a review and we make it so when they click that link, it automatically takes them to Google where they’re logged in and they’re posting the review.

We can get reviews on every other platform, but if we can get it directly on Google, that’s the gold standard for now. Really good example of this company we worked with for quite some time is the Plumbing Earths in Bonita Springs. And you can see here. In their Naples location, 1,200 reviews in Bonita Springs, 1,500 reviews.

And this was a company that’s less than a decade old, so it wasn’t like they had to generations to generate all of those leads. And you can see here, $21,000 in advertising. $884 per lead 844 leads, excuse me, $25 and 30 cents per lead. So when you’ve got the conversion factors in place you’ve got a great website that’s built to convert, you’ve got a great reputation your average cost per lead will come down, right?

Which will make you more profitable with every other piece of marketing that you put in place. Alright, number three, when it comes to conversion is automation. John just said automation is key. Automation in the way that we follow up with our leads. Automation in the way that we generate online reviews.

Here’s what I’m gonna say, right? There’s a million different ways to generate leads in your plumbing, HVC electrical business, right? Whether it’s SEO, paid search, brand advertising, referrals, word of mouth, thumbtack next door, lots of places to generate leads. The problem that I see more often than not is not that we don’t have enough leads, it’s that we’re not converting enough of the leads that we generate.

And what I see for the companies that have only phone conversion as an option are only converting like 50 to 60% of their inbound calls. And we’ve recently moved to AI transcribing all of the inbound leads and reading the outcomes. Did they answer, was it qualified? Did it get booked, or did it not get booked?

And unfortunately, it’s, even if they’re interested, it’s only like 50 to 60%. And then if we’re still just using web forms, like a form that somebody can fill in online. Tho that’s where leads go to die, right? Because nobody’s following up. Nobody’s following through on those leads quick enough for them to convert.

And so really why is that? Why is that happening? Leads that you don’t follow up within in 15 minutes or less go cold, and it’s really probably more like five minutes or less. If whether they called in or they submitted their form, they started the chat, they either visit your website, if you’re not following up super quick, they’re gonna go cold.

The average customer needs to touch five to seven times before they convert. Almost every plumbing HVAC home service company I know is only focused on the immediate converted lead. It’s okay, they called in. Did you wanna schedule a time, yes or no? And if it’s not, we’re hanging up. There’s nobody checking back with that person.

There’s no text message going out. It’s just maybe they’ll call back when they’re ready. If we can be a little bit more assertive, leveraging automation, we can capture a lot more of those. In today’s customer would prefer to interact via text message, via phone. Most plumbing, HVAC, home service companies just want to use their phone.

They want their dispatch staff, and that’s all they want. But the reality is let’s connect with the customer the way they want to connect, which is via text message. And so the solution absolutely exists in today’s market, right? Mar marketing automation has been, on the scene for almost 10 years.

But, in today’s market, the automation is here and it’s present, and we can absolutely put it in play. And what we could do is make sure that every lead gets followed up within two minutes or less. Gets a phone call, a text message, an email and then gets added to a drip sequence based on conversion or not conversion, where we’re just checking in, Hey, you called the other day for.

Replacing your water heater. Did you get that taken care of? Question mark. Hey, just wanted to check in. You still need help with that, right? Keep following up and you are going to win. Like you are going to get those leads that had a problem that just got busy that didn’t schedule it just yet. And so our solution for this is called conversion amp.

And really it’s the entire flow from lead to book job to review request to repeated referral client that comes out on the other side. And of course we’re gonna able to integrate with most of your dispatch platforms that you’re using, whether it’s ServiceTitan or House called Pro.

If you want to check this out, you can go to conversion amp.com. This is something we can figure, optimize, and implement for the clients that we work with. So when it comes to conversion optimization where’s the opportunity, right? I’d like you to find what’s the red opportunity right now?

Is it that the website just. Doesn’t have those three conversion factors. Is it that we don’t have a strategy where a review request is going out automatic after every service call? Or is it that we don’t have automation in place? We’re manually picking up the phone and sending emails like we’re in the dark ages.

When your competitors are using automation, they’re following up with every lead via phone and text within minutes. Where’s the opportunity for you right now to remain on the cutting edge with your conversion? Let me know one in the chat.

Alright, and an easy way to do this in your workbook, there’s a slide a section for this. You can just highlight it and highlight it in the color. That makes sense. Alright. Last but not least, in, in really in order to triple our sales, in order to have accelerated growth, there’s three things we have to focus on.

Number one is total spent, right? Nobody wants to think about if I want to go from a million. To 2 million or from 2 million to 5 million or 5 million to 10 million, I’m gonna need to spend more. And so there’s a percentage of revenue or revenue target that we wanna reinvest back into marketing.

And John, that’s a great question. It’s gonna vary based on how aggressively you’re looking to grow. But a lot of times when I talk to a plumbing HVAC home service company that grew to a certain level, whatever that level was, let’s say it’s 5 million or 3 million and they’ve been there for quite some time, and we say, okay, look, what’s the marketing strategy?

How much are we investing in marketing? They’ve got the same money that they were spending five years ago, they’re spending the same amount that they did to get to where they are today. If we want to grow, we need to invest probably a little bit more. And so what we found, and I’ve got a whole spreadsheet I can share with you on this as part of our annual planning process, and we do this with all of our clients is let’s get clear on where we are today.

Let’s get clear on the goal over the next 12 months. Let’s see how much we would need to invest in marketing to bring that into a reality. Let’s figure out how many leads we need to generate on a monthly basis in order to make that happen. And then let’s track against it on an ongoing basis what we get, what we measure gets done.

And so to remain static, this is statistics, right? Based on the groups that we’re in and kinda what we’ve seen, it’s about 5%, right? So if you’re taking 5% of your revenue and reinvesting in marketing, that’s gonna probably keep you give or take 10% more or less than where you are right now. If you invest back six to 15%, that’s moderate growth.

That’s okay, I’m ready to go forward within the organization. 15% plus is accelerated growth, right there, you get enough money to put in, apply most of the strategies to generate leads to generate sales now. This amount of money feels excessive, right? Unless you’ve got the tracking dialed in, right?

If you’ve got the tracking where, you know I’m spending that 15%, whether that’s 10,000, 20,000, or $50,000 a month, but I know that I’m generating leads, I’m generating sales, I’m generating revenue growth, I’m happy to spend that money, right? John, does that answer the question? So somewhere between six and 15% or more would be the sweet spot.

In order to really create some momentum, you wanna make sure you spend that money wisely. And so that’s we might need to increase the total spent. Now, the next metric though is our average cost per lead. Don’t go spend a lot of money on advertising if you don’t have the tracking dialed in. And I think at a minimum we need to know if I’m spending $5,000 per month, how many leads am I getting?

What’s my average cost per lead? You wanna make sure you’ve got that number hammered in, right? And so we track this metric very closely. I’ve showed you a number of examples throughout the course of this this workshop, at a minimum, we know here’s how much we spent $12,000 in the case of Paul the plumber, here’s how many leads we generated.

1,119 leads, right? Here’s where those leads came from. What’s the distribution of that and what’s our average cost per lead? It’s just a simple metric. Total leads divided by our total spend, divided by leads. That’s our average cost per lead. You wanna know that number. You wanna track against that number and don’t vex over it either, right?

Who cares if you’re getting $10 leads, if they’re all unconverted opportunities, right? Or they’re just low ticket stuff that you don’t want more of. There’s a place where you can spend a little bit more per lead ’cause you know there’s a much higher quality customer or a much higher end job on the back end of that, but really know what that number is.

And then ultimately, if we want to be an accelerated growth, right? And we want to be able to go, to the next level in our plumbing HVAC home service company, we’ve gotta track to the return on investment, right? That at the end of the day, who cares how much you’re investing. If there’s an ROI, we can continue to roll that money forward.

And we wanna be able to see, all right, in, in the case of Paul the plumber again on that 1,100 leads, how many of them were qualified? 951. How many of them actually got booked? 606. And then what’s the actual revenue generated? So $272,000 on an $11,000 investment. That’s a 20 time return on investment.

Alright, let’s go. Alright, let’s go. You wanna have those metrics, you want to have your marketing dialed in that way. What we’ve moved to recently that I’m a big fan of is rather than just projecting the return on investment, we wanna try and take a feed from your dispatch system. Whether that’s ServiceTitan or Housecall Pro or Field Edge or Sarah, whatever you happen to use we want to get into the back end of the API so we can match the leads we’re generating from an internet marketing perspective back to the actual jobs that are booked within the platform so we can see truly what’s happening on the other end.

And when you start to dial in that level of return on investment, you can confidently see, okay, let’s go hire that next technician. Let’s go expand to that next market. Let’s continue to grow and scale this plumbing HVC electrical business. And so we call this our ROI Insights report, and that’s exactly what it is.

It matches the leads that we’re generating, that we track back to the actual customer inside your platform so that we can show you the return on investment and we can drill down on the backend. How much of that’s coming from Google ads? How much of that’s coming from local service ads? How much that’s coming from the organic, whether that’s chat t or some other generative engine.

Let’s make sure we track it so that we can reallocate that budget to the things that are generating the best results, right? And that’s where we get accelerated growth within our organization. And so we come full circle, and I’d love for you to just dial in on this. When you think about your you’re optimizing results, where’s the red flag?

Is it that we’re not spending enough, maybe we’re only spending like 1% of our revenues. Is it we don’t know what our average cost per lead is? Or is it like we’re not tracking the true return investment, we’re just guessing in terms of, Hey, I got leads. Hopefully some of that turned into book jobs.

And so that’s the model. Hopefully there were some good insights and takeaways. Hopefully there’s some clarity in your workbook here, like in terms of okay. It’s a simple model, but if we do these things consistently and we can absolutely generate better results online. I’ll share one last example here again we talked about Paul the plumber.

$12,000 in spend, a hundred, 1,555 leads, $7 and 75 cents per lead. Grew from six trucks to 16 trucks on pace to do $15 million. And they’ve got confidence in sustained growth. And that’s really what I wanna show you today was how can you do it? How can you implement it? Who are other plumbing, HVAC, electrical home service companies that have done this, that are getting the results?

If you’d some help with this, we’d love the opportunity to chat. This is what we do day in, day out. We’d love to start with doing an evaluation of your current online marketing. So we would pull up your website, we would pull up an organic search result. We would look at the conversion factors on your website and show you, Hey, here’s what’s good.

Here’s where you’re missing the opportunities and here’s how we can help. And if it makes sense, we’ll talk about doing business together. So if you’d some help with that no pressure, but we’d love to chat. You can go to plumber seo.net/schedule. Or go call us at (866) 610-4647. And if you’ve got any burning questions, feel free to drop them in.

John says, this is awesome, Josh, and thanks for all the insights. It all starts in marketing. Absolutely guys, thanks for being on here today. Thanks for hanging out with me. I appreciate those of you that chatted in as we were going through. If you’ve got any questions, you feel free to reach out to me anytime.

You can email me josh@plumbersseo.net or take the next step. Schedule a time, plumbersseo.net/schedule, and we’ll see you. We’ll see you again real soon.